Revit Circuit Referencing Using Dynamo Part Two

The main reason behind these articles is that a question I get asked regularly whilst training the electrical section of an Autodesk Revit MEP course is, “can you re-format the circuit references for 3 phase circuits so they look more like the UK standard?” Normally the answer is no, as Revit uses the US format for referencing the 3 live phases which are A, B & C, whereas in the UK we use L1, L2, L3. Therefore, when you create electrical circuits as standard they will look as below, with the Phase followed by the Way (A1, B1, C1) - see below:

To initially give the reference a format more like the UK version you can access the ‘Electrical Settings > General Tab’ and amend the Circuit Naming by Phase preferences to A = L1, B = L2 & C = L3. This will now give you the circuit number L11, although adding a hyphen or oblique after the phase reference in the electrical settings will result in a slightly better format i.e. L1/1.

This is all well and good but it still doesn’t answer the entire question, as the formatting of the circuit reference is still not quite right. However, there still must be a way of extracting the data and re-formatting it from Phase/Way to Way/Phase. But how?

After reviewing the options using Dynamo I opted to split the circuit Reference into two, therefore separating the Phase and the Way. For this I needed to create custom parameters to extract the information to; these would be created from a shared parameter file so tags could also be created.

In the full tutorial, we are going to map the Revit circuit data to the parameters with Dynamo, effectively splitting the Revit circuit reference in two. You can download it now by pressing the button:

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